What are you working on?

[Baker]

I took a slight [and still ongoing detour] to try to understand OpenGL respectably well. It was super aggravating at first, but it is starting to make a lot of sense.

I'm actually enjoying it now.

Not a project per se, but I'm pleasantly surprised at how much I'm liking it.

[mh]

Porting Quake to Direct 3D cos I'm sick of poor quality OpenGL drivers.



So far so good!

[Lardarse]

There was actually a D3DQuake a while ago. Might still be able to find it...

[r00k]

I think Baker has a D3d ProQuake port...

[mh]

Aye, but that one used a gl_fakegl for D3D equivalents of the OpenGL calls. This one is real Direct3D 9, written from scratch.

[Spike]

let me know if you figure out the periodic half-second lag thing...

[Baker]

Aye, but that one used a gl_fakegl for D3D equivalents of the OpenGL calls. This one is real Direct3D 9, written from scratch.

Yeah that will be an interesting thing to see.

The old Direct3D Quake "port" is very crash prone and not really that good. Except to someone who otherwise can't use any GLQuake, with the Intel display adapter fix that number is very, very small.

A true native use of Direct3D in a Quake engine would be very nice.

Those ubiquitous Intel display adapters and I guess the issues with ATI cards have really hurt OpenGL (plus other things).

I [vastly] prefer platform independence [because I think this is the future eventually], but with the countless Intel display adapters in all their forms, OpenGL 1.2 is the defacto standard and will be for a very long time because of the sheer number of them -- which isn't very good compared to Direct3D 9.

[mh]

It's portability versus compatibility really, isn't it? Direct 3D will run far more flawlessly than OpenGL on a higher percentage of current hardware, unless you resort to various ugly hacks (witness Doom 3's multiple render paths), which kind of takes away from the fact that OpenGL is supposed to be easier to use. You get your basic code up and running fairly quickly, but once you start pushing the envelope you end up having to put in an equal amount of work to get there. The really nice thing about Direct 3D (especially 9, I don't know 10, and what I've seen of earlier versions makes me wince) is that it really "just works". Once you get over the whole Vertex Buffer and Lock/Unlock thing, it's actually a very nice API to code for, if a little on the verbose side at times.

Anyway, I think I have an almost complete port now; just a few days of tidying up and restructuring to do, and I'll release it.

Oh, and Let there be Lightmaps!.

[Baker]

Direct 3D will run far more flawlessly than OpenGL on a higher percentage of current hardware

Yeah, the plan of trusting the hardware manufacturer's to implement specifications properly does not have seemed to have fared so well.

/If only the OpenGL drivers were open source, I bet they could have been corrected.

Anyway, I think I have an almost complete port now; just a few days of tidying up and restructuring to do, and I'll release it.

That is going to be to fun try to out.

---

Kind of a side topic, as I've explored OpenGL more and more, I have an interesting idea that could go very well with a FitzQuake-like texture manager:

The ability to experiment with changing textures within the game in real time.

In Windows, I'd really like to have more clipboard interactivity in Quake. Not simple stuff like copy console to clipboard but sophisticated abilities like begin able to test out a map and have a paint program open and replacing textures via copy/paste and maybe other game data.

[Electro]

Nice work mh! Definitely worthy of its own thread

[Urre]

Wicked awesome mh, loving the 64bit lightmaps, too!

[Chris]

http://mrgamedev.com/files/port/dpmgui001.zip

GUI front end I quickly put together to make dealing with dpmodel.exe a bit easier.

[jim]

Ooh, excellent. I've been wanting to have one, but then I just lacked the coding skills to do a GUI. Going to test it soon.

edit: Tested! it's good. No need to write batch files or use command prompt anymore

[Chris]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tIihfMM4ll4

[GiffE]

That's beautiful, Chris